Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the addition of images on a given Internet site through direct links. In case you have site A, for instance, and somebody creates site B and wishes to include a couple of images from your Internet site, they could either save the images and then add them on their Internet site or they can simply place links on their website to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load directly from your web hosting account. This approach is sometimes used for documents and other types of files too. If you want to prevent third parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you could restrict their capability to use direct links to your files on their sites.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It shall not take more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, since all our shared plans come with a simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we offer you. While the common technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you shall only have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.